A swarm of petulant blind men are gathered around an elephant, searching
him inch by inch for something at which to sneer. What they resent is not
so much that he towers over them, and can see farther than they can
imagine. Nor is it that he has been trying for nearly half a century to
warn them of the tigers approaching through the distant grasses downwind.
They do resent these things, but what they really, bitterly resent is his
damnable contention that they are not blind, his insistent claim that they
can open up their eyes any time they acquire the courage to do so.

Unforgivable.

How
shall we repay our debt to Robert Anson Heinlein?

I
am tempted to say that it can't be done. The sheer size of the debt is
staggering. He virtually invented modern science fiction, and did not
attempt to patent it. He opened up a great many of SF's frontiers,
produced the first reliable maps of most of its principal territories, and
did not complain when each of those frontiers filled up with hordes of
johnny-come-latelies, who the moment they got off the boat began to
complain about the climate, the scenery and the employment opportunities.
I don't believe there can be more than a handful of science fiction
stories published in the last forty years that do not show his influence
one way or another. He has written the definitive time-travel stories
(“All You Zombies—” and “By His Bootstraps”), the definitive longevity
books (Methuselah's Children and Time Enough For Love), the
definitive theocracy novel (Revolt in 2100), heroic fantasy/SF
novel (Glory Road), revolution novel (The Moon Is a Harsh
Mistress), transplant novel (I Will Fear No Evil), alien
invasion novel (The Puppet Masters), technocracy story (“The Roads
Must Roll”), arms race story (“Solution Unsatisfactory”), technodisaster
story (“Blowups Happen”), and about a dozen of the finest science fiction
juveniles ever published. These last alone have done more for the field
than any other dozen books. And perhaps as important, he broke SF out of
the pulps, opened up “respectable” and lucrative markets, broached the
wall of the ghetto. He continued to work for the good of the entire genre:
his most recent book sale was a precedent-setting event, representing the
first-ever SFWA Model Contract signing. (The Science Fiction Writers of
America has drawn up a hypothetical ideal contract, from the SF writer's
point of view—but until Expanded Universe— no such contract had
ever been signed.) Note that Heinlein did not do this for his own benefit:
the moment the contract was signed it was renegotiated upward.

You
can't copyright ideas; you can only copyright specific arrangements
of words. If you could copyright ideas, every living SF writer would be
paying a substantial royalty to Robert Heinlein.

So
would a lot of other people. In his spare time Heinlein invented the waldo
and the waterbed (and God knows what else), and he didn't patent them
either. (The first waldos were built by Nathan Woodruff at Brookhaven
National Laboratories in 1945, three years after Heinlein described them
for a few cents a word. As to the waterbed, see Expanded Universe.)
In addition he helped design the spacesuit as we now know it.

Above all Heinlein is better educated, more widely read and traveled than
anyone I have ever heard of, and has consistently shared the Good Parts
with us. He has learned prodigiously, and passed on the most interesting
things he's learned to us, and in the process passed on some of his love
of learning to us. Surely that is a mighty gift. When I was five years old
he began to teach me to love learning, and to be skeptical about what I
was taught, and he did the same for a great many of us, directly or
indirectly.

How
then shall we repay him?

Certainly not with dollars. Signet claims 11.5 million Heinlein books in
print. Berkley claims 12 million. Del Rey figures are not available, but
they have at least a dozen titles. His latest novel fetched a record
price. Extend those figures worldwide, and it starts to look as though
Heinlein is very well repaid with dollars. But consider at today's prices
you could own all forty-two of his books for about a hundred dollars plus
sales tax. Robert Heinlein has given me more than a Cnote's worth of
entertainment, knowledge and challenging skullsweat, more by several
orders of magnitude. His books do not cost five times the price of
Philip Roth's latest drool; hence they are drastically underpriced.

We
can't repay him with awards, nor with honors, nor with prestige. He has a
shelf-full of Hugos (voted by his readers), the first-ever Grand Master
Nebula for Lifetime Contribution to Science Fiction (voted by his fellow
writers), he is an Encyclopaedia Britannica authority, he is the
only man ever to be a World Science Fiction Convention Guest of Honor
three times—it's not as though he needs any more flattery.

We
can't even thank him by writing to say thanks—we'd only make more work for
his remarkable wife Virginia, who handles his correspondence these days.
There are, as noted, millions of us (possibly hundreds of millions)—a
quick thank-you apiece would cause the U.S. Snail to finally and forever
collapse—and if they were actually delivered they would make it difficult
for Heinlein to get any work done.

I
can think of only two things we could do to thank Robert Heinlein.

First, give blood, now and as often as you can spare a half hour and a
half pint. It pleases him; blood donors have saved his life on several
occasions. (Do you know the I Will Fear No Evil story? The plot of
that book hinged on a character having a rare blood type; routine [for
him] research led Heinlein to discover the National Rare Blood Club; he
went out of his way to put a commercial for them in the forematter of the
novel. After it was published he suffered a medical emergency, requiring
transfusion. Surprise: Heinlein has a rare blood type. His life was saved
by Rare Blood Club members. There is a persistent rumor, which I am unable
to either verify or disprove, that at least one of those donors had joined
because they read the blurb in I Will Fear No Evil.)

The
second suggestion also has to do with helping to ensure Heinlein's
personal survival—surely the sincerest form of flattery. Simply put, we
can all do the best we personally can to assure that the country Robert
Heinlein lives in is not ruined. I think he would take it kindly if we
were all to refrain from abandoning civilization as a failed experiment
that requires too much hard work. (I think he'll make out okay even if we
don't—but he'd be a lot less comfortable.) I think he would be pleased if
we abandoned the silly delusion that there are any passengers on Starship
Earth, and took up our responsibilities as crewmen—as he has.

Which occasionally involves giving the Admiral your respectful attention.
Even when the old fart's informed opinions conflict with your own ignorant
prejudices.

The
very size of the debt we all owe Heinlein has a lot to do with the
savagery of the recent critical assaults on him. As Jubal Harshaw once
noted, gratitude often translates as resentment. SF critics, parasitic on
a field which would not exist in anything like its present form or size
without Heinlein, feel compelled to bite the hand that feeds them.
Constitutionally unable to respect anything insofar as it resembles
themselves, some critics are compelled to publicly display disrespect for
a talent of which not one of them can claim the tenth part.

And
some of us pay them money to do this.

Look, Robert Heinlein is not a god, not even an angel. He is “merely” a
good and great man, and a good and great writer, no small achievements.
But there seems to be a dark human compulsion to take the best man
around, declare him a god, and then scrutinize him like a hawk for the
sign of human weakness that will allow us to slay him. Something in us
likes to watch the mighty topple, and most especially the good mighty. If
someone wrote a book alleging that Mother Teresa once committed a venial
sin, it would sell a million copies.

And
some of the cracks made about Robert Heinlein have been pretty personal.
Though the critics swear that their concern is with criticizing
literature, few of them can resist the urge to criticize Heinlein the man.

Alexei Panshin, for instance, in Heinlein in Dimension, asserts as
a biographical fact, without disclaimer of hearsay, that Heinlein “cannot
stand to be disagreed with, even to the point of discarding friendships.”
I have heard this allegation quoted several times in the twelve years
since Panshin committed it to print. Last week I received a review copy of
Philip K. Dick's new short story collection, The Golden Man
(Berkley); I quote from its introduction:

I
consider Heinlein to be my spiritual father, even though our political
ideologies are totally at variance. Several years ago, when I was ill,
Heinlein offered his help, anything he could do, and we had never met; he
would phone me to cheer me up and see how I was doing. He wanted to buy me
an electric typewriter, God bless him—one of the few true gentlemen in
this world. I don't agree with any ideas he puts forth in his writing,
but that is neither here nor there. One time when I owed the IRS a lot
of money and couldn't raise it, Heinlein loaned the money to me.

. . . he
knows I'm a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when we
were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what
I love.

(italics mine-SR)

Full disclosure here: Robert Heinlein has given me, personally, an
autograph, a few gracious words, and a couple of hours of conversation.
Directly. But when I was five he taught me, with the first and weakest of
his juveniles, three essential things: to make up my own mind, always; to
think it through before doing so; to get the facts before
thinking. Perhaps someone else would have taught me those things sooner or
later; that's irrelevant: it was Heinlein who did it. That is who and what
I love.

Free speech gives people the right to knock who and what I love; it also
gives me the right to rebut.

Not
to “defend.” As to the work, there it stands, invulnerable to noise made
about it. As to the man, he once said that “It is impossible to insult a
man who is not unsure of himself.” Fleas can't bite him. Nor is there any
need to defend his literary reputation; people who read what critics tell
them to deserve what they get.

No,
I accepted this commission because I'm personally annoyed. I grow weary
of hearing someone I love slandered; I have wasted too many hours at
convention parties arguing with loud nits, seen one too many alleged
“reference books” take time out to criticize Heinlein's alleged political
views and literary sins, heard one too many talentless writers make
speeches that take potshots at the man who made it possible for them to
avoid honest work. At the next convention party I want to be able to
simply hand that loud nit a copy of Destinies and go back to having
fun.

So
let us consider the most common charges made against Heinlein. I arrange
these in order of intelligence, with the most brainless first.

I. Personal Lapses

(Note: all these are most-brainless, as not one of the critics is in any
position to know anything about Heinlein the man. The man they attack is
the one they infer from his fiction: a mug's game.)

(1)
“Heinlein is a fascist.” This is the most popular Heinlein
shibboleth in fandom, particularly among the young and, of course,
exclusively among the ignorant. I seldom bother to reply, but in this
instance I am being paid. Dear sir or madam: kindly go to the library,
look up the dictionary definition of fascism. For good measure, read the
history of fascism, asking the librarian to help you with any big words.
Then read the works of Robert Heinlein, as you have plainly not done yet.
If out of forty-two books you can produce one shred of evidence that
Heinlein—or any of his protagonists—is a fascist, I'll eat my copy of
Heinlein in Dimension.

(2)
“Heinlein is a male chauvinist.” This is the second most common
charge these days. That's right, Heinlein populates his books with dumb,
weak, incompetent women. Like Sister Maggie in “If This Goes On—”; Dr.
Mary Lou Martin in “Let There Be Light”; Mary Sperling in Methuselah's
Children; Grace Cormet in “—We Also Walk Dogs”; Longcourt Phyllis in
Beyond This Horizon; Cynthia Craig in “The Unpleasant Profession of
Jonathan Hoag”; Karen in “Gulf”; Gloria McNye in “Delilah and the
Space-Rigger”; Allucquere in The Puppet Masters; Hazel and Edith
Stone in The Rolling Stones; Betty in The Star Beast; all
the women in Tunnel in the Sky; Penny in Double Star; Pee
Wee and the Mother Thing in Have Space Suit—Will Travel; Jill
Boardman, Becky Vesant, Patty Paiwonski, Anne, Miriam and Dorcas in
Stranger in a Strange Land; Star, the Empress of Twenty Universes, in
Glory Road; Wyoh, Mimi, Sidris and Gospazha Michelle Holmes in
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress; Eunice and Joan Eunice in I Will Fear
No Evil; Ishtar, Tamara, Minerva, Hamadryad, Dora, Helen Mayberry,
Llita, Laz, Lor and Maureen Smith in Time Enough For Love; and
Dejah Thoris, Hilda Corners, Gay Deceiver and Elizabeth Long in “The
Number of the Beast—. “[1]

Brainless cupcakes all, eh? (Virtually every one of them is a world-class
expert in at least one demanding and competitive field; the exceptions
plainly will be as soon as they grow up. Madame Curie would have enjoyed
chatting with any one of them.) Helpless housewives! (Any one of them
could take Wonder Woman three falls out of three, and polish off Jirel of
Joiry for dessert.)

I
think one could perhaps make an excellent case for Heinlein as a female
chauvinist. He has repeatedly insisted that women average smarter, more
practical and more courageous than men. He consistently underscores their
biological and emotional superiority. He married a woman he proudly
described to me as “smarter, better educated and more sensible than I am.”
In his latest book, Expanded Universe—the immediate occasion for
this article—he suggests without the slightest visible trace of irony that
the franchise be taken away from men and given exclusively to women. He
consistently created strong, intelligent, capable, independent, sexually
aggressive women characters for a quarter of a century before it was made
a requirement, right down to his supporting casts.

Clearly we are still in the area of delusions which can be cured simply by
reading Heinlein while awake.

(3)
“Heinlein is a closet fag.” Now, this one I have only run into
twice, but I include it here because of its truly awesome silliness, and
because one of its proponents is Thomas Disch, himself an excellent
writer. In a speech aptly titled, “The Embarrassments of Science Fiction,”
reprinted in Peter Nicholls' Explorations of the Marvelous, Disch
asserts, with the most specious arguments imaginable, that there is an
unconscious homosexual theme in Starship Troopers. He apparently
feels (a) that everyone in the book is an obvious fag (because they all
act so macho, and we all know that all macho men are really fags, right?
Besides, some of them wear jewelry, as real men have never done in
all history.); (b) that Heinlein is clearly unaware of this (because he
never overtly raises the issue of the sex habits of infantry in a book
intended for children and published in 1962), and (c) that (a) and (b),
stipulated and taken together, would constitute some kind of successful
slap at Heinlein or his book or soldiers ... or something. Disch's sneers
at “swaggering leather boys” (I can find no instance in the book of anyone
wearing leather) simply mystify me.

The
second proponent of this theory was a young woman at an SF convention
party, ill-smelling and as ugly as she could make herself, who insisted
that Time Enough For Love proved that Heinlein wanted to fuck
himself. I urged her to give it a try, and went to another party.

(4)
“Heinlein is right wing.” This is not always a semantic
confusion similar to the “fascist” babble cited above; occasionally the
loud nit in question actually has some idea of what “right wing” means,
and is able to stretch the definition to fit a man who bitterly opposes
military conscription, supports consensual sexual freedom and women's
ownership of their bellies, delights in unconventional marriage customs,
champions massive expenditures for scientific research, suggests radical
experiments in government; and; has written with apparent approval of
anarchists, communists, socialists, technocrats,
limited-franchise-republicans, emperors and empresses, capitalists,
dictators, thieves, whores, charlatans and even career civil servants (Mr. Kiku in The Star Beast). If this indeed be conservatism, then Teddy
Kennedy is a liberal, and I am Marie of Romania.

And
if there were anything to the allegation, when exactly was it that the
conservative viewpoint was proven unfit for literary consumption? I missed
it.

(5)
“Heinlein is an authoritarian.” To be sure, respect for law and
order is one of Lazarus Long's most noticeable characteristics. Likewise
Jubal Harshaw, Deety Burroughs, Fader McGee, Noisy Rhysling, John Lyle,
Jim Marlowe, Wyoming Knott, Manuel Garcia O'Kelly-Davis, Prof de la Paz
and Dak Broadbent. In his latest novel, “The Number of the Beast—, “
Heinlein seems to reveal himself authoritarian to the extent that he
suggests a lifeboat can have only one captain at a time. He also suggests
that the captain be elected, by unanimous vote.

(6)
“Heinlein is a libertarian.” Horrors, no! How dreadful. Myself, I'm
a serf.[2]

(7)
“Heinlein is an elitist.” Well, now. If by that you mean that he
believes some people are of more value to their species than others, I'm
inclined to agree—with you and with him. If you mean he believes a learned
man's opinion is likely to be worth more than that of an ignoramus, again
I'll go along. If by “elitist” you mean that Heinlein believes the strong
should rule the weak, I strongly disagree. (Remember frail old
Professor de la Paz, and Waldo, and recall that Heinlein himself was
declared “permanently and totally disabled” in 1934.) If you mean he
believes the wealthy should exploit the poor, I refer you to The Moon
Is a Harsh Mistress and I Will Fear No Evil. If you mean he
believes the wise should rule the foolish and the competent rule the
incompetent, again I plead guilty to the same offense. Somebody's
got to drive—should it not be the best driver?

How
do you pick the best driver? Well, Heinlein has given us a multiplicity of
interesting and mutually exclusive suggestions; why not examine them?

(8)
“Heinlein is a militarist.” Bearing in mind that he abhors the
draft, this is indeed one of his proudest boasts. Can there really be
people so naive as to think that their way of life would survive the magic
disappearance of their armed forces by as much as a month? Evidently; I
meet 'em all over.

(9)
“Heinlein is a patriot.” (Actually, they always say “superpatriot.”
To them there is no other kind of patriot.) Anyone who sneers at
patriotism—and continues to live in the society whose supporters he
scorns—is a parasite, a fraud, or a fool. Often all three.

Patriotism does not mean that you think your country is perfect, or
blameless, or even particularly likeable on balance; nor does it mean that
you serve it blindly, go where it tells you to go and kill whom it tells
you to kill. It means that you are committed to keeping it alive and
making it better, that you will do whatever seems necessary (up to and
including dying) to protect it whenever you, personally, perceive a mortal
threat to it, military or otherwise. This is something to be ashamed of?
I think Heinlein has made it abundantly clear that in any hypothetical
showdown between species patriotism and national patriotism the former,
for him, would win hands down.

(10) “Heinlein is an atheist,” or “agnostic,” or
“solipsist,” or “closet fundamentalist,” or “hedonistic
Calvinist,” or . . . Robert Heinlein has consistently refused to
discuss his personal religious beliefs; in one of his stories a character
convincingly argues that it is impossible to do so meaningfully. Yet
everyone is sure they know where he stands. I sure don't. The one thing
I've never heard him called (yet) is a closet Catholic (nor am I
suggesting it for a moment), but in my new anthology, The Best of All
Possible Worlds (Ace Books), you will find a story Heinlein selected
as one of his personal all-time favorites, a deeply religious tale by
Anatole France (himself generally labeled an agnostic) called “Our Lady's
Juggler,” which I first heard in Our Lady of Refuge grammar school in the
Bronx, so long ago that I'd forgotten it until Heinlein jogged my memory.

In
any event his theology is none of anybody's damned business. God knows
it's not a valid reason to criticize his fiction.

(11) “Heinlein is opinionated.” Of course, I can't speak for him,
but I suspect he would be willing to accept this compliment. The people
who offer it as an insult are always, of course, as free of opinions
themselves as a newborn chicken.

Enough of personal lapses. What are the indictments that have been handed
down against Heinlein's work, his failures as a science fiction
writer? Again, we shall consider the most bone­headed charges first.

II. Literary Lapses

(1)
“Heinlein uses slang.” Sorry. Flat wrong. It is very seldom that
one of his characters uses slang or argot; he in authorial voice never
does. What he uses that is miscalled “slang” are idiom and colloquialism.
I won't argue the (to me self-evident) point that a writer is supposed to
preserve them—not at this time, anyway. I'll simply note that you can't
very well criticize a man's use of a language whose terminology you don't
know yourself.

(2)
“Heinlein can't create believable women characters.” There's an
easy way to support this claim: simply disbelieve in all Heinlein's female
characters, and maintain that all those who believe them are gullible.
You'll have a problem, though: several of Heinlein's women bear a striking
resemblance to his wife Virginia, you'll have to disbelieve in her,
too—which could get you killed if your paths cross. Also, there's a lady I
once lived with for a long time, who used to haunt the magazine stores
when I Will Fear No Evil was being serialized in Galaxy,
because she could not wait to read the further adventures of the
“unbelievable” character with whom she identified so strongly—you'll have
to disbelieve in her, too.

Oddly, this complaint comes most often from radical feminists. Examination
shows that Heinlein's female characters are almost invariably highly
intelligent, educated, competent, practical, resourceful, courageous,
independent, sexually aggressive and sufficiently personally secure to be
able to stroke their men's egos as often as their own get stroked. I
will—reluctantly—concede that this does not sound like the average
woman as I have known her, but I am bemused to find myself in the position
of trying to convince feminists that such women can in fact exist.

I
think I know what enrages the radicals: two universal characteristics of
Heinlein heroines that I left out of the above list. They are always
beautiful and proud of it (regardless of whether they happen to be
pretty), and they are often strongly interested in having babies. None
of them bitterly regrets and resents having been born female—which of
course makes them not only traitors to their exploited sex, but
unbelievable.

(3)
“Heinlein's male characters are all him.” I understand this notion
was first put forward by James Blish in an essay titled, “Heinlein, Son of
Heinlein,” which I have not seen. But the notion was developed in detail
by Panshin. As he sees it, there are three basic male personae Heinlein
uses over and over again, the so-called Three-Stage Heinlein Individual.
The first and youngest stage is the bright but naive youth; the second is
the middle-aged man who knows how the world works; the third is the old
man who knows how it works and why it works, knows how it got that way.
All three, Panshin asserts, are really Heinlein in the thinnest of
disguises. (Sounds like the average intelligent man to me.)

No
one ever does explain what, if anything, is wrong with this, but the
implication seems to be that Heinlein is unable to get into the head of
anyone who does not think like him. An interesting theory—if you overlook
Dr. Ftaeml, Dr. Mahmoud, Memtok, David McKinnon, Andy Libby, all the
characters in “Magic, Inc.” and “And He Built a Crooked House,” Noisy
Rhysling, the couple in “It's Great To Be Back,” Lorenzo Smythe, The Man
Who Traveled in Elephants, Bill Lermer, Hugh Farnham, Jake Salomon, all
the extremely aged characters in Time Enough For Love, all the
extremely young characters in Tunnel in the Sky except Rod Walker,
and all four protagonists of “The Number of the Beast—” (among many
others). Major characters all, and none of them fits on the three-stage
age/wisdom chart. (Neither, by the way, does Heinlein—who was
displaying third-stage wisdom and insight in his early thirties.)

If
all the male Heinlein characters that can be forced into those three
pigeonholes are Heinlein in thin disguise, why is it that I have no
slightest difficulty in distinguishing (say) Juan Rico from Thorby, or
Rufo from Dak Broadbent, or Waldo from Andy Libby, or Jubal Harshaw from
Johann Smith? If Heinlein writes in characterizational monotone, why don't
I confuse Colonel Dubois, Colonel Baslim and Colonel Manning? Which of the
four protagonists of “The Number of the Beast—” is the real
Heinlein, and how do you know?

To
be sure, some generalizations can be made of the majority of Heinlein's
heroes—he seems fascinated by competence, for example, whereas writers
like Pohl and Sheckley seem fascinated by incompetence. Is this a flaw in
any of these three writers? If habitual use of a certain type of
character is a literary sin, should we not apply the same standard
to Alfred Bester, Kurt Vonnegut, Phil Dick, Larry Niven, Philip Roth,
Raymond Chandler, P.G. Wodehouse, J.P. Donleavy and a thousand others?

(4)
“Heinlein doesn't describe his protagonists physically.” After I
have rattled off from memory extensive physical descriptions of Lazarus
and Dora and Minerva Long, Scar Gordon, Jubal Harshaw and Eunice Branca,
complainers of this type usually add, “unless the mechanics of the story
require it.” Thus amended, I'll chop it—as evidence of the subtlety of
Heinlein's genius. A maximum number of his readers can identify with his
characters.

What these types are usually complaining about is the absence of any
poetry about physical appearance, stuff like, “Questing eyes like dwarf
hazelnuts brooded above a strong yet amiable nose, from which depended
twin parentheses framing a mouth like a pink Eskimo Pie. Magenta was his
weskit, and his hair was the color of mild abstraction on a winter's
morning in Antigonish.” In Heinlein's brand of fiction, a picture is
seldom worth a thousand words—least of all a portrait.

But
I have to admit that Alexei Panshin put his finger on the fly in the
ointment on p. 128 of Heinlein in Dimension: “. . . while the
reader doesn't notice the lack of description while he reads, afterwards
individual characters aren't likely to stand out in the mind.” In other
words, if you leave anything to the reader's imagination, you've lost
better than half the critics right there. Which may be the best thing to
do with them.

(5)
“Heinlein can't plot.” One of my favorite parts of Heinlein in
Dimension is the section on plot. On p. 153 Panshin argues that
Heinlein's earliest works are flawed because “they aren't told crisply.
They begin with an end in mind and eventually get there, but the route
they take is a wandering one.” On the very next page Panshin criticizes
Heinlein's later work for not wandering, for telling him only those
details necessary to the story.

In
“Gulf,” for instance, Heinlein spends one day in time and 36 pages in
enrolling an agent. He then spends six months, skimmed over in another
30-odd pages, in training the agent. Then, just to end the story, he kills
his agent off in a job that takes him one day, buzzed over in a mere 4
pages. The gradual loss of control is obvious.

Presumably the significant and interesting parts of Panshin's life come at
steady, average speed. Or else he wanted the boring and irrelevant parts
of Joe's life thrown in to balance some imaginary set of scales. (Oh, and
just to get the record straight, it is clearly stated in “Gulf” that Joe's
final mission takes him many days.) All written criticism I have seen of
Heinlein's plotting comes down to this same outraged plaint: that if you
sit down and make an outline of the sequence of events in a Heinlein
story, it will most likely not come out symmetrical and balanced. Right
you are: it won't. It will just seem to sort of ramble along, just
like life does, and at the end, when you have reached the place where the
author wanted you to go, you will look back at your tracks and fail to
discern in them any mathematical pattern or regular geometric shape. If
you keep looking, though, you'll notice that they got you there in the
shortest possible distance, as straightforwardly as the terrain allowed.
And that you hurried.

That they cannot be described by any simple equation is a sign of
Heinlein's excellence, not his weakness.

(6)
“Heinlein can't write sex scenes.” This one usually kicks off an
entertaining hour defining a “good sex scene.” Everybody disagrees with
everybody on this, but most people I talk to can live with the following
four requirements: a “good” sex scene should be believable, consensual
(all parties consenting), a natural development of the story rather than
a pasted-on attention-getter, and, hopefully, sexually arousing.

In
order: Heinlein has never described any sexual activity that would
cause either Masters or Johnson even mild surprise. In forty-two books I
can recall only one scene of even attempted rape (unsuccessful, fatally
so) and two depictions of extremely mild spanking. I have found no
instances of gratuitous sex, tacked on to make a dull story interesting,
and I defy anyone to name one.

As
to the last point, if you have spent any time at all in a pornshop (and if
you haven't, why not? Aren't you at all curious about people?) you'll have
noticed that none of the clientele is aroused by more than five to
ten percent of the available material. Yet it all sells or it wouldn't be
there. One man's meat is another man's person. Heinlein's characters may
not behave in bed the way you do—so what?

It
has been argued by some that “Heinlein suddenly started writing about sex
after ignoring it for years . . .” They complain that all of Heinlein's
early heroes, at least, are Boy Scouts. Please examine any reasonably
complete bibliography of early Heinlein—the one in the back of Heinlein
in Dimension will do fine. Now: if you exclude from consideration (a)
juvenile novels, in which Heinlein could not have written a sex
scene, any more than any juvenile-novelist could have in the forties and
fifties; (b) stories sold to John Campbell, from which Kay Tarrant cut all
sex no matter who the author; (c) stories aimed at and sold to
“respectable,” slick, non-SF markets which were already breaking enough
taboos by buying science fiction at all; (d) tales in which no sex subplot
was appropriate to the story; and (e) stories for Boys' Life whose
protagonists were supposed to be Boy Scouts; what you are left with
as of 1961 is two novels and two short stories, all rife with sex. Don't
take my word, go look it up. In 1961, with the publication of
Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein became one of the first SF
writers to openly discuss sex at any length, and he has continued to do so
since. (Note to historians: I know Farmer's “The Lovers” came nine years
earlier—but note that the story did not appear in book form until 1961,
the same year as Stranger and a year after Sturgeon's Venus Plus
X.) I know vanishingly few septuagenarians whose view of sex is half
so liberal and enlightened as Heinlein's—damn few people of any
age, more's the pity.

(7)
“Heinlein is preachy.” “preachy: inclined to preach.” “preach: to
expound upon in writing or speech; especially, to urge acceptance of or
compliance with (specified religious or moral principles).”

Look: the classic task of fiction is to create a character or characters,
give he-she-or-them a problem or problems, and then show his-her-their
struggle to find a solution or solutions. If it doesn't do that,
comparatively few people will pay cash for the privilege of reading it.
(Rail if you will about “archaic rules stifling creative freedom”: that's
the way readers are wired up, and we exist for their
benefit.) Now: if the solution proposed does not involve a moral principle
(extremely difficult to pull off), you have a cookbook, a how-to manual,
Spaceship Repair for the Compleat Idiot. If no optimal solution is
suggested, if the problem is left unsolved, there are three possibilities:
either the writer is propounding the moral principle that some
problems have no optimal solutions (e.g. “Solution Unsatisfactory” by
R.A.H.), or the writer is suggesting that somebody should find a
solution to this dilemma because it beats the hell out of him, or the
writer has simply been telling you a series of pointless and depressing
anecdotes, speaking at great length without saying anything (e.g. most of
modern mainstream litracha). Perhaps this is an enviable skill, for a
politician, say, but is it really a requirement of good fiction?

Exclude the above cases and what you have left is a majority of all the
fiction ever written, and the overwhelming majority of the good fiction.

But
one of the oddities of humans is that while we all want our fiction to
propose solutions to moral dilemmas, we do not want to admit it. Our
writers are supposed to answer the question, “What is moral
behavior?”—but they'd better not let us catch them palming that card.
(Actually, Orson and I are just good friends.) The pill must be heavily
sugar-coated if we are to swallow it. (I am not putting down people.
I'm a people. That bald apes can be cajoled into moral speculation by
any means at all is a miracle, God's blessing on us all. Literature is the
antithesis of authoritarianism and of most organized religions—which seek
to replace moral speculation with laws—and in that cause we should all be
happy to plunge our arms up to the shoulders in sugar.)

And
so, when I've finished explaining that “preachy” is a complimentary
thing to call a writer, the people who made the charge usually backpedal
and say that what they meant was:

(8)
“Heinlein lectures at the expense of his fiction.” Here, at last,
we come to something a little more than noise. This, if proved, would seem
a genuine and serious literary indictment.

Robert Heinlein himself said in 1950:

A science
fiction writer may have, and often does have, other motivations in
addition to pursuit of profit. He may wish to create “art for art's sake,”
he may want to warn the world against a course he feels disastrous
(Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World—but please note
that each is intensely entertaining, and that each made stacks of money),
he may wish to urge the human race toward a course which he considers
desirable (Bellamy's Looking Backward, Wells' Men Like Gods),
he may wish to instruct, to uplift, or even to dazzle. But the science
fiction writer—any fiction writer—must keep entertainment consciously in
mind as his prime purpose... or he may find himself back dragging that
old cotton sack.

(from “Pandora's Box,” reprinted in Expanded
Universe)

The
charge is that in his most recent works, Robert Heinlein has subordinated
entertainment to preaching, that he has, as Theodore Sturgeon once said
of H.G. Wells' later work, “sold his birthright for a pot of message.” In
evidence the prosecution adduces I Will Fear No Evil, Time
Enough For Love, the second and third most recent Heinlein novels, and
when “The Number of
the Beast—” becomes generally
available, they'll probably add that one too.

Look: nobody wants to be lectured to, right? That is, no one wants to be
lectured to by some jerk who doesn't know any more than they do. But do
not good people, responsible people, enlightened citizens, want to
be lectured to by someone who knows more than they do? Have we really been
following Heinlein for forty years because he does great card tricks?
Only?

Defense is willing to stipulate that, proportionately speaking, all three
of People's Exhibits tend to be—by comparison with early Heinlein—rather
long on talk and short on action (Time Enough For Love perhaps
least so of the three). Defense wishes to know, however, what if anything
is wrong with that, and offers for consideration Venus Plus X,
Triton, Camp
Concentration and The
Thurb Revolution.

I Will Fear No Evil concerns a
man whose brain is transplanted into the body of a healthy and horny
woman; to his shock, he learns that the body's original personality, its
soul, is still present in his new skull (or perhaps, as Heinlein is
careful not to rule out, he has a sustained and complex hallucination to
that effect). She teaches him about how to be female, and in the process
learns something of what it's like to be male. Is there any conceivable
way to handle this theme without lots of internal dialogue, lots of
sharing of opinions and experiences, and a minimum of fast-paced action?
Or is the theme itself somehow illegitimate for SF?

Time Enough For Love concerns
the oldest man in the Galaxy (by a wide margin), who has lived so
long that he no longer longs to live. But his descendants (and by
inescapable mathematical logic most of the humans living by that point
are his descendants) will not let him die, and seek to restore his
zest for living by three perfectly reasonable means: they encourage him to
talk about the Old Days, they find him something new to do, and
they smother him with love and respect. Do not all of these involve a lot
of conversation? As I mentioned above, this book has action
aplenty, when Lazarus gets around to reminiscing (and lying); that
attempted-rape scene, for instance, is a small masterpiece, almost a
textbook course in how to handle a fight scene.

But
who says that ideas are not as entertaining as fast-paced action?

“The Number of the Beast—” (I
know, on the cover of the book it says The Number of the Beast,
without quotes or dash; that is the publishers' title. I prefer
Heinlein's.) I hesitate to discuss this book as it is unlikely you can
have read it by now and I don't want to spoil any surprises (of which
there are many). But I will note that there is more action here than in
the last two books put together, and—since all four protagonists are
extraordinarily educated people, who love to argue—a whole lot of lively
and spirited dialogue. I also note that its basic premise is utterly,
delightfully preposterous—and that I do not believe it can be disproved.
(Maybe Heinlein and Phil Dick aren't that far apart after all.) It held my
attention most firmly right up to the last page, and indeed holds it yet.

Let
me offer some more bits of evidence.

One: According to a press release which chanced to land on my desk last
week, three of Berkley Publishing Company's top ten all-time bestselling
SF titles are Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough For Love,
and I Will Fear No Evil.

Two: In the six years since it appeared in paperback, Time Enough For
Love has gone through thirteen printings—a feat it took both
Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress ten
years apiece to achieve.

Three: Gregg Press, a highly selective publishing house which brings out
quality hardcover editions of what it considers to be the finest in SF,
has already printed an edition of I Will Fear No Evil, designed to
survive a thousand readings. It is one of the youngest books on the Gregg
List.

Four: The Notebooks Of Lazarus Long, a 62-page excerpt from Time
Enough For Love comprising absolutely nothing but opinions,
without a shred of action, narrative or drama, is selling quite briskly in
a five-dollar paperback edition, partially hand-lettered by D.F. Vassallo.
I know of no parallel to this in all SF (unless you consider Tolkien
“SF”).

Five: Heinlein's latest novel, “The Number of the Beast—,”
purchased by editors who, you can assume, knew quite well the
dollars-and-cents track record of Heinlein's last few books, fetched an
all-time genre-record-breaking half a million dollars.

Plainly the old man has lost his touch, eh? Mobs of customers, outraged at
his failure to entertain them, are attempting to drown him in dollars.

What's that? You there in the back row, speak up. You say you aren't
entertained, and that proves Heinlein isn't entertaining? Say, aren't you
the same person I saw trying to convince that guy from the New York
Times that SF is not juvenile brainless adventure but the literature
of ideas? Social relevance and all that?

What that fellow in the back row means is not that ideas and opinions do
not belong in a science fiction novel. He means he disagrees with some of
Heinlein's opinions. (Even that isn't strictly accurate. From the noise
and heat he generates in venting his disagreement, it's obvious that he
hates and bitterly resents Heinlein's opinions.)

I
know of many cases in which critics have disagreed with, or vilified, or
forcefully attacked Robert Heinlein's opinions. A few were even able to
accurately identify those opinions.[3]
I know of none who has succeeded in disproving, demonstrating to be
false, a single one of them. I'm sure it could happen, but I'm still
waiting to see it.

Defense's arms are weary from hauling exhibits up to the bench; perhaps
this is the point at which Defense should rest.

Instead I will reverse myself, plead guilty with an explanation, and throw
myself on the mercy of the court. I declare that I do think the
sugar-coating on Heinlein's last few books is (comparatively) thin, and
not by accident or by failure of craft. I believe there is a good reason
why the plots of the last three books allow and require their
protagonists to preach at length. Moral, spiritual, political and
historical lessons which he once would have spent at least a novelette
developing are lately fired off at the approximate rate of a half dozen
per conversation. That his books do not therefore fall apart the
way Wells' last books did is only because Heinlein is incapable of writing
dull. Over four decades it has become increasingly evident that he is not
the “pure entertainment” song and dance man he has always claimed to be,
that he has sermons to preach—and the customers keep coming by the
carload. Furthermore, with the passing of those four decades, the urgency
of his message has grown.

And
so now, with his very latest publication, Expanded Universe,
Heinlein has finally blown his cover altogether. I think that makes
Expanded Universe, despite a significant number of flaws, the single
most important and valuable Heinlein book ever published.

Let
me tell you a little about the book. It is built around a previously
available but long out of print Heinlein collection, The Worlds of
Robert A. Heinlein, but it has been expanded by about 160%, with
approximately 125,000 words of new material, for a total of about 202,500
words. Some of the new stuff is fiction, although little of it is science
fiction (about 17,500 words). But the bulk of the new material, about
84,000 words, is nonfiction. Taken together it's as close as Heinlein is
ever going to get to writing his memoirs, and it forms his ultimate
personal statement to date. In ten essays, a polemic, one and a half
speeches and extensive forewords and afterwords for most of thirteen
stories, Heinlein lets us further inside his head then he ever has before.
And hey, you know what? He doesn't resemble Lazarus Long much at all.

For
instance, although he is plainly capable of imagining and appreciating it,
Heinlein is not himself able to sustain Lazarus' magnificent ingrained
indifference to the fate of any society. Unlike Lazarus, Heinlein loves
the United States of America. He'll tell you why, quite specifically, in
this book. Logical, pragmatic reasons why. He will tell you, for instance,
of his travels in the Soviet Union, and what he saw and heard there. If,
after you've heard him out, you still don't think that for all its warts
(hell, running sores), the United States is the planet's best hope for an
enlightened future, there's no sense in us talking further; you'll be
wanting to pack. (Hey, have you heard? The current government of the
People's Republic of China [half-life unknown] has allowed as how limited
freedom of thought will be permitted this year. Provisionally.[4])You know, the redneck clowns who chanted “America—love it or leave it!”
while they stomped me back in the sixties didn't have a bad slogan.
The only problem was that they got to define “love of America,” and they
limited its meaning to “blind worship of America.” In addition they
limited the definition of America to “the man in the White House.”

These mistakes Heinlein certainly does not make. (Relevant quote from
Expanded Universe: “Brethren and Sistren, have you ever stopped to
think that there has not been one rational decision out of the Oval
Office for fifty years?”—[italics his—SR]). In this book he identifies
clearly, vividly and concisely the specific brands of rot that are eating
out America's heart. He outlines each of the deadly perils that face the
nation, and predicts their consequences. As credentials, he offers a
series of fairly specific predictions he made in 1950 for the year 2000,
updated in 1965, and adds 1980 updates supporting a claim of a sixty-six
percent success rate-enormously higher than that of, say, Jeane Dixon. He
pronounces himself dismayed not only by political events of the last few
decades, but by the terrifying decay of education and growth of
irrationalism in America. (Aside: in my own opinion, one of the best
exemplars of this latter trend is Stephen King's current runaway
bestseller The Stand, a brilliantly entertaining parable in praise
of ignorance, superstition, reliance on dreams, and the sociological
insights of feeble-minded old Ned Ludd.)

It
is worth noting in this connection that while Heinlein has many scathing
things to say about the U.S. in Expanded Universe, he has prohibited
publication of the book in any other country.[5]
We don't wash family linen with strangers present. I don't know of any
other case in which an SF writer deliberately (and drastically) limited
his royalties out of patriotism, or for that matter any moral or ethical
principle. I applaud.

Friends, one of the best educated and widely traveled men in America has
looked into the future, and he is not especially optimistic.

It
cannot be said that he despairs. He makes many positive, practical
suggestions—for real cures rather than Band-Aids. He outlines specifically
how to achieve the necessary perspective and insight to form intelligent
extrapolations of world events, explains in detail how to get a decent
education (by the delightful device of explaining how not to get
one), badly names the three pillars of wisdom, and reminds us that “Last
to come out of Pandora's Box was a gleaming, beautiful thing—eternal
Hope.”

But
the last section of the book is a matched pair of mutually exclusive
prophecies, together called “The Happy Days Ahead.” The first is a gloomy
scenario of doom, the second an optimistic scenario. He says, “I can risk
great gloom in the first because I'll play you out with music at the end.”

But
I have to admit that the happy scenario, Over the Rainbow, strikes
me as preposterously unlikely.

In
fact, the only thing I can imagine that would increase its probability
would be the massive widespread reading of Expanded Universe.

Which brings me to what I said at the beginning of this essay: if you want
to thank Robert A. Heinlein, do what you can to see to it that the country
he loves, the culture he loves, the magnificent ideal he loves, is not
destroyed. If you have the wit to see that this old man has a genuine
handle on the way the world wags, kindly stop complaining that his
literary virtues are not classical and go back to doing what you used to
do when SF was a ghetto-literature scorned by all the world: force copies
of Heinlein on all your friends. Unlike most teachers, Heinlein has been
successfully competing with television for forty years now. Anyone that
he cannot convert to rationalism is purely unreachable, and you know,
there are a hell of a lot of people on the fence these days.

I
do not worship Robert Heinlein. I do not agree with everything he says.
There are a number of his opinions concerning which I have serious
reservations, and perhaps two with which I flat-out disagree (none of
which I have the slightest intention of washing with strangers present).
But all of these tend to keep me awake nights, because the only arguments
I can assemble to refute him are based on “my thirty years of experience,”
of a very limited number of Americans and Canadians—and I'm painfully
aware of just how poorly that stacks up against his seventy-three years of
intensive study of the entire population and the entire history of the
planet.

And
I repeat: if there is anything that can divert the land of my birth from
its current stampede into the Stone Age, it is the widespread
dissemination of the thoughts and perceptions that Robert Heinlein has
been selling as entertainment since 1939. You can thank him, not by buying
his book, but by loaning out the copy you buy to as many people as
will sit still for it, until it falls apart from overreading. (Be sure and
loan Expanded Universe only to fellow citizens.) Time is short: it
is no accident that his latest novel devotes a good deal of attention to
the subject of lifeboat rules. Nor that Expanded Universe contains
a quick but thorough course in how to survive the aftermath of a nuclear
attack. (When Heinlein said in his Guest of Honor speech at MidAmeriCon
that “there will be nuclear war on Earth in your lifetime,” some people
booed, and some were unconvinced. But it chanced that there was a
thunderstorm over the hotel next morning—and I woke up three feet in the
air, covered with sweat.) Emergencies require
emergency measures, so drastic that it will be hard to persuade people of
their utter necessity.

If
you want to thank Robert Heinlein, open your eyes and look around you—and
begin loudly demanding that your neighbors do likewise.

Or—at the very least-please stop loudly insisting that the elephant is
merely a kind of inferior snake, or tree, or large barrel of leather, or
oversized harpoon, or flexible trombone, or...

(When I read the above as my Guest of Honor speech at the New England
Science Fiction Association's annual regional convention, Boskone, I took
Heinlein's advice about playing them out with music literally, and closed
with a song. I append it here as well. It is the second filksong[6]
I've ever written, and it is set to the tune of Old Man River,
as arranged by Marty Paich on Ray Charles' Ingredients in a Recipe For
Soul. [If you're not familiar with that arrangement, the scansion will
appear to limp at the end.] Guitar chords are provided for would-be
filksingers, but copyright is reserved for recording or publishing
royalties, etc.)

The Heinlein
Society was founded by Virginia Heinlein on behalf of her husband, science
fiction author Robert Anson Heinlein, to "pay forward" the legacy of Robert A. Heinlein to future generations of "Heinlein's Children."